Seretse turns to High Court in bid to disqualify prosecutor in Petroleum Fund case

A long-running battle over who holds the legal authority to prosecute one of Botswana’s most closely watched financial crime cases has moved to a higher stage, as businessman Bakang Seretse presses the High Court to remove a senior anti-corruption official from the matter altogether.

Having failed in his first attempt before a lower court, Seretse has filed a notice of appeal challenging the ruling handed down by Broadhurst Regional Magistrate Mareledi Dipate on 30 June 2026. The ruling had rebuffed his effort to strip Thabo Malambane, an executive at the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC), of the power to prosecute him.

Seretse, who faces a cluster of criminal charges tied to the National Petroleum Fund (NPF), is not disputing – at least not yet – the substance of the allegations against him. His argument is narrower and, in his telling, more fundamental: that the officials steering the case have no lawful standing to do so.

In his appeal, Seretse asks the High Court to set aside Magistrate Dipate’s judgment, grant the application the lower court denied, and quash the charge sheet bearing Malambane’s signature, along with every charge it contains.

A single document at the centre

The dispute turns on a single document – a written authority to prosecute issued by the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions. Seretse contends that the magistrate never answered the central question before her: whether that written authority amounted to a lawful delegation of power under Section 51A of the Constitution. Instead, he argues, she leaned on Statutory Instrument (SI) No. 57 of 2005, sidestepping the constitutional test entirely.

The defense presses the point further. The magistrate erred, it maintains, by relying on SI 57 without first establishing whether the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) even possesses the statutory power to issue delegated legislation. Section 8 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, Seretse asserts, grants the DPP no such legislative authority to make statutory instruments in the first place.

The effect, should the appeal succeed, would be to call into question the very scaffolding on which the State has built its case. For now, Seretse is training his fire not on the financial crime allegations themselves, but on the jurisdiction and authority of the officers prosecuting them – a line of attack that places the legality of the State’s entire prosecutorial framework squarely before the High Court.

A case marked by prolonged combat

The NPF matter remains one of the country’s highest-profile financial crime prosecutions. It implicates Seretse alongside Sharifa Noor, Kgori Capital (Pty) Ltd, and Kgori Holdings (Pty) Ltd, in transactions running into millions of Pula.

From the moment of the first arrests and asset seizures, the case has unfolded as a prolonged contest of legal maneuvering, winding its way through magistrate courts, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal. Along that path have come frozen bank accounts, restrained real estate, forfeited luxury vehicles, and bitterly contested search warrants invoked under proceeds-of-crime legislation.

Now, with the appeal lodged, the question that has shadowed the proceedings from the start resurfaces in sharper form – not whether Seretse is guilty, but whether the men prosecuting him were ever entitled to try.

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